One major common problem faced by cellular and landline service providers is market competition. In today's climate of competitive markets, cellular service providers have found that one way for them to grow market share and defend their businesses is to be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with landline service providers. In addition, cellular service providers seek to differentiate their service offerings, and to capture the largest portion of market revenue by meeting an ever increasing demand for access to a wide range of media forms such as MP3 encoded audio, still and video imaging, data, instant messaging, and email. In a similar manner, the landline service providers have found that to grow market share and ward off competition, they too must be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with cellular service providers. Support for broad economical access to these converging forms of communication is needed to enable unfettered market growth, and to support the development and use of new handheld devices needed to provide increasing levels of mobile multimedia communication functionality.
Although the formation of alliances and partnerships between cellular service providers and landline service providers may help to ward off competition, such alliances and partnerships are faced with other problems. For example, the erection of cellular infrastructure such as cellular towers may be an expensive venture since this may require acquisition of real estate, whether in the form of outright purchases or through leasing. Cellular infrastructure also requires the establishment of one or more expensive backbone links to handle core network traffic. Another cellular-related problem is that the cellular signals do not penetrate and propagate in buildings such as homes and offices very well. This is especially true with the frequencies that are typically utilized in the United States, which may vary between 800 MHz and 1900 MHz or 1.9 GHz.
With present day broadband access gateways, the control of user access to the resources of the broadband network is normally based primarily upon network protocol addresses or physical device addresses from or to which access is attempted. Access is allowed or prohibited by specifying to an access control mechanism a network address, and whether access is or is not to be permitted. Systems that permit control of network access typically provide the same breadth of network access to all users of the network.
In the vast majority of cases, the control of user access is simply binary—the user either is or is not allowed access, and all users are treated equally. No means is provided by which the owner/operator of such a gateway can adjust the breadth or depth of access on a per-user basis, and the criteria upon which access is based are generally established prior to access through registration with the owner/operator of the gateway.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.